Who
remembers the time when big loud fans were being slapped onto undersized heatsinks and being
sold to consumers hungry for some overclocking? With heatsink names that always somehow managed to
fit the word "overclock" into their description, it still makes me cringe a little. The sound
of fear these days comes from those old 60 dB Delta's reeving up - which while good for cooling - are utterly, absolutely, and
unconditionally too loud for normal every day computers in the home.

Whatever,
that was then and this is now. Manufacturers and consumers have regained their senses and
cast out the loud heatsinks for quieter ones; Zalman's, Coolermaster's, Globalwin's, the
list goes on. Fanner, who create heatsinks under the Spire and sometimes even
Speeze name have recently added this little lower noise heatsink to their
line up.

The Spire EasyStream 9T236B1M3G is
a Pentium 4 heatsink which should enter the markets priced pretty competitively.
The heatsink is after all entirely extruded aluminum,
though to give credit where it is due,
Fanner have machined the base rather nicely. For a Pentium 4 heatsink this is a
very rare sight.

The
low noise aspect of the heatsink stems from running the EasyStream's 70mm fan at just
3700RPM. This cuts down on the amount of airflow being delivered to the heatsink body comparatively, but thermal
performance can still be pretty good if the heatsink is designed to be efficient as possible. Let's move forward and find
out...